Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday October 01, 2007 @09:59AM
from the because-they-must dept.

JCWDenton writes "In a bid to spin its web-based version of Office into contention with rival internet behemoth Google, Microsoft has said it will begin accepting applications for beta testing its web apps later this year. There is one significant difference, however: unlike Google apps, Microsoft said users of its new service can only create or edit online documents if they have Office software already installed on their machines. Microsoft said features of its Office Live Workspace would include allowing users to upload more than 1,000 documents to free personal websites."

My guess is to allow you to use Office tools while not at your usual desktop machine. One serious downside, however, is that this makes piracy that much easier: one legal copy would be needed per office, with all other machines logged into the online version. No blank media and CD-key cracking required.

My guess is to allow you to use Office tools while not at your usual desktop machine.

The summary states that you can only edit online documents when using a computer that has Office installed...so, even if it's not your usual desktop machine, it still needs to have Office installed (assuming the summary is correct)

However, it does seem to make it easier to pirate - instead of installing the whole Office package and somehow cracking the CD-key issue, you could just do a quick copy-over of the applicable registry entries.

And you think that's going to be easy? Fuck, have you seen what Office dumps into your registry. If I didn't knew that it's an Office Suite, I'd think it's a Operating Service pack in the likes of XP SP2....

you could just do a quick copy-over of the applicable registry entries.

At a guess I expect that it will use the Office ActiveX controls, and of course the whole thing will probably only run in IE as a result. Admittedly this will be completely and utterly pointless to a level never before previously seen, but that's Microsoft for you.

If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?

There is no point. You need to see Microsoft thinks in multiple steps, and this is just step 1.

Step 1 is about rolling out a beta of this software, and allow the public to test it, give feedback, and their devs to improve on that.

The fact they offer it only to existing customers means there's no chance that this may hurt their Office sales. And it also lets the world know that Microsoft is "aware" of competing web products, such as Google's.

Should things get rough (Step 2), Microsoft already will have a mature web product in their hands, it will have people familiar with working with this product, and have the option of changing how to offer it, including separately for an yearly fee, as Google does.

It's the benefit of having so much money, you can throw them in all directions and use what "sticks".

my thinking on this went like this, 'how can Microsoft leverage their existing monopolies on the Windows OS and office applications?'. Well, putting this out there for free to existing Microsoft Office users is one way to leverage the MS Office monopoly. After all, once Microsoft built this monopoly, they've been really consistent at making sure only MS Office vX users could exchange with MS Office vX users. If they don't tie this with MS Office 2007, they'll surely do so at a later date.

Step One of the forward looking steps which are ALWAYS part of Microsoft's project design principles is 'How can it be used to protect the monopoly?'.

Microsoft does not need any money from these web apps, just needs to make sure the gravy trains of MS Windows and MS Office continue. Google is looking for revenue and coming up with tools/ideas to attract customers. Microsoft is doing what it's done for close to 20 years, attacking new ideas and protecting what it has. IMO.

their market share has been slowly, but consistently decreasing in several areas - especially in the web browser arena and to some extent in the computer arena, especially since Vista has been such a flop in the business world (tangent: Apple really needs to boost their OS soon - that was supposed to happen this year, right?).As much as they may appear to be resisting change and attempting to maintain their position, every new innovation is affecting them and forcing Microsoft to adapt, if ever so slightly

And Microsoft's long long history of these kinds of attacks on competitors does not make them a friend of consumers or a friend of businesses. They surely have done very little to be a friend to me and far far more to the contrary. And convicted monopolies can not protect their monopolies. It is illegal.

Additionally, you may be able to just view the documents without office. This might be useful in some cases; PowerPoint presentations, for instance, and some people make documentation available as Word documents, for some reason. Especially if they are in that minority of docs that OpenOffice doesn't render quite right.

some people make documentation available as Word documents, for some reason

It could be because it's sort of the de-facto standard for business documents anymore (and has been for some time). I maintain 4 copies of some things (html, txt, pdf, and word) because, for a while, I was sending pdf's of documents, and kept getting mailed back by people wanting.doc

Now, I jump through hoops to provide all forms of documentation to all people. It can be a huge headache at times.

Well, there is the same point that has convinced me to use Google Docs for a few minor things, which is the convenience of being able to edit within a web browser and use a central storage location that's available ubiquitously.

I probably wouldn't store important and/or personal documents that I care about with Google or Microsoft, but I have used Google docs for jotting things down between work and home. I've also made use of the features for letting a couple of other people collabora

You got that right - there is no point, but not for the reasons you specify.If you RTFTA you'd see that this is nothing more than a glorified WebDAV directory. The functionality they're talking about is something we've been using for freaking ever with Apache/Mod_SSL/WebDAV. We routinely read, write, and save documents to and from anywhere in the world collaboratively with other people in the office, with the server being an old P3 Desktop too old and slow to work as a desktop anymore running CentOS for fre [centos.org]

I can see step 3 being something like an ActiveX control wrapping winword.exe but step 4 is just wrong. Microsoft has failed at adding revenue to their three money makers(MS Windows,MS Office, MS WindowsServer) for the last 15 years. So "Profit" is a long shot and not really much of a concern for them. I'm sure they'd like to actually have something successful at not losing money but the main goal of any MS project is to protect the money makers they have. And do so at pretty much any cost. They make billio

Of course, the nice thing about Google Docs is all I need is a compliant browser on any suitable operating system, so what we're talking about here, once you strip away all the hype, is nothing more than remote storage of your documents. I mean, if you need Office installed, then it only eliminates the step where you copy the file from a remote site to the local machine, then edit and then upload it again.Not that Google Docs is all that great; it's certainly no Office, and maybe it's simply not possible t

This is all about mating everything we like about desktop apps (rich ui, etc.) to collaboration tools found in online apps.

Basically, Sharepoint for the masses.

Sharepoint is a bastardized version of what the Web has enjoyed for years, if you knew where to look. I do agree about the motivations behind this little Office trick, though... I'm thinking OWA for Office, but this time you have to have the app anyway.

Then again, what exactly were they thinking? It's useless if you already have Office and a Web Browser - you go get the online doc, you work on the doc. All of these steps are pretty much the same no matter what route you take - the only real diff being

Just read the articles and it doesn't bear much similarity to the summary Taco posted. There is a M$ press release [microsoft.com] that describes a off-site document hosting set up. As long as you have Office installed on a machine you can download/edit/review documents from the server anywhere in the world. Not really comparable to Googles offerings.

Mod parent's post up. Microsoft is NOT creating a "browser-based" version of MS Office. The press release simply describes a collaboration service that allows you to store and share office documents online. Folks assuming otherwise haven't read the press release (big surprise) and are dolts.

As long as you have Office installed on a machine you can download/edit/review documents from the server anywhere in the world. Not really comparable to Googles offerings.

Office has had the ability to be embedded in a web page as an ActiveX control for years now, and Word and Excel have had revision tracking for some time (maybe others, I'm not sure). And they have relatively mature HTML export functions. All MS really needs to do is add upload capabilities to the ActiveX control, which it may already have,

Microsoft has been trying to switch to the service model forever. If they had an online version the could charge either a per use fee, or a monthly subscription. Right now they're 'stuck' with their one time sale that doesn't provide MS with the money they feel the deserve.

If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?

Because if you would have RTFA you'd have realized that the blurb is yet another example of MS bashing FUD.

The service isn't an online office application in the flavor of Google's online service but rather an online storage area where the documents can be viewed by anyone with permission. You'd still need MS Office to edit or create.

because constantly adding drive space to your MS Exchange email server is driving you nuts and it's driving MS Exchange performance down. If that is what the article is really about then maybe Microsoft is just trying to build a control channel which lessens the load of sending 3+MB of MS Word or MS Powerpoint files around the enterprise via email.My guess is that they'll tie this into the email clients and servers so the user doesn't know about it.

The only point would be collaboration or having the documents automatically saved somewhere other than your own hard drive, for folks that don't want to go to the minimal effort of backing up their computers themselves.

The only point would be collaboration or having the documents automatically saved somewhere other than your own hard drive, for folks that don't want to go to the minimal effort of backing up their computers themselves.

Google is competing with MS Office? Don't you actually have to have a product on the market to be considered a competitor?

At this point, all the pies Google plans to have their thumbs in are nothing more than vaporware.

There are certain documents that I store in google docs and spreadsheets. I'd hardly call their apps vaporware.

Microsoft has a product. Google's online office tools perform a similar function. Its very possible people can say that Google's suite is "good enough" for some people not to buy Office. On top of that, if someone uses Google's office suite because its free and then decides they need more functionality, they would be more likely to consider Open Office if they already find free office suites a

There are more advantages to Google's offerings too. Such as being cross-browser, and for me, cross-platform. Oh, and their free too, unless you buy the corporate version.

90% of the MS Word docs I have seen at two fortune 500 companies are very simple documents that can be handled very easily in Google's web-based Google Docs. The vast majority of the spread sheets I see are simple enough to be handled by Google's spread sheet app as well. The only exceptions I see for spread sheets are ones coming f

One stop automated sharing. Now I don't have to worry, that all my data isn't being shared with Google, Microsoft, any of their bussiness partners that would like to target me for advertising, the FBI, Homeland Security, etc...

Too true, but seriously, you ask a good question: Why the web?For tax preparation software, I can understand it. It changes considerably every year, you only need it for one or two days out of the year, and it facilitates electronic filing.

But where's the convenience in trying to cram a full-featured word processor or spreadsheet into a web browser? I can see this going one place only: micropayments. Clippy says, "It looks like you're trying to write a letter. Please deposit twenty-five cents."

Collaborators who dont have a desktop version of Microsoft Office software can still view and comment on the document in a browser.

So, this would also allow cheap/low-budget businesses to buy a smaller number of licenses for editing, with all other collaborators creating a list of comments leading to each document update. That actually sounds like a good idea, in my mind, since it restricts the final editing to a single user (for style and accountability purposes) while c

And will work only Internet Explorer, let me guess. This is will be competition, how?

Indeed. One of the major points of google apps is that I can edit files from a Windows box at wr0k, and from a Linux box at home [or from anywhere, in fact] (not to mention have a reliable `backup' provided by google).

As much as I don't like MS, I think MS Word is a pretty good product (besides for the locked file format)---editing the files is pretty enjoyable; a bit better tuned than OpenOffice), and if it weren't for suc

It will be competition because Microsoft will direct its existing customers to the online service using its already established dominant Microsoft Office product. Only working in MSIE is irrelevant because everyone who uses Office has MSIE installed.

You forgot a "con." If your browser has any issues at all, you're locked out. I've run into a handful of people running Vista that get mysterious "stackhash" errors when running IE. Not such a big deal for web surfing, but a huge deal for services tied to the browser. Office doesn't work, time to reinstall the OS!

It would also make it easier to pirate, which could be either a pro or a con depending on your side of the situation. You could copy a legit user's applicable registry entries and then use the online service without ever installing Office on your machine (if the service really just checks for your installation, rather than launching it as part of its processing).

"Ease of sharing documents" is the only one that's valid in that list. Honestly, I've *never* patched any version of Office I've owned, and never had a problem - even the current version, which I do patch only by virtue of the updater nagging me, poses no problems. So really, patched or not Office works fine. Also, I tend to work a lot during travel time - planes, trains, buses, what have you... A tube-based Office simply won't work, and I know a LOT of businessmen who do the same.

Yet another fine example of how competition is good. Although personally I've moved away from the buggy implementation of Google Docs (the text editing is fairly clumsy) to OOo. I've lost access to the internet part however I rarely used it (simply stopped me from opening a second program and the load times were seeing this advantage dwindle). I might have been tempted to try out Microsoft's offering, but I'd rather not be tied to Windows right now (might change later next year when I give Office 2007 a whirl).

Microsoft does not know how to "compete" in a free market. Its knee-jerk reaction has always been to get involved in anything the others are doing, not to "compete", per se, but to throw their weight around in the market. That is not the same thing.

Are they trying to share DLLs between installed MS-Office software and the Web based spreadsheet and word tools? Given their track record this is typically the kind of thing they will do. They preload MS-Office DLLs during boot to create the impression of instant-on MS-Office compared to OpenOffice. (They don't have try this hard to beat OpenOffice in launch time, but that is a different issue). They might tunnel behind the browser and security and everything so that the web based tool can give you faster response time. They don't have to stream in code to execute in the browser and they don't have to send changes back to the server to rerender the page being edited.

I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"

Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.

It's much more likely that Office will simply launch as a tab or iframe in IE, with no actual connection to the net besides the ability to store and retrieve documents from one of Microsoft's servers. What's being sold here, ultimately, is an MS-hosted fileserver with provisions for sharing files amongst one's coworkers.

In terms of actual document-editing capabilities, Google's office toys aren't serious competition for anyone. Their strength is in providing collaboration tools for small to medium-sized business. (Forget the enterprise.) OpenOffice actually is competition for MS Office in terms of capabilities, though it still lags way behind in collaboration tools. Until Google -- or someone else -- stops screwing around with second-rate DHTML clones of WordPad, and builds MS Office-equivalent (and interoperable) collaboration tools for OpenOffice, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Google in this area.

In the meantime, Microsoft is just fishing around for new revenue streams. The problem here isn't that Microsoft doesn't get it. They get it just fine. The problem is that neither their customer base nor their competition get it. You and I, dear reader, may be dismayed by their bullshit, but we aren't part of the target market in the first place.

Until Google -- or someone else -- stops screwing around with second-rate DHTML clones of WordPad, and builds MS Office-equivalent (and interoperable) collaboration tools for OpenOffice, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Google in this area.

People are messing with "second-rate DHTML clones" as you call them because, they don't want to sink tons of money in Ms-Office replacement, only to see MS move the goal posts, change the file formats. Their code would become useless then. Till somehow MS gets nailed

Actually, I think he was right on pretty much all accounts. Requiring the software to be installed negates the majority of the usefulness: Being able to use it from anywhere.The only benefit it gives is easy uploads of documents to a central location... That could easily be done with webservices and the regular Office app. As far as MS is concerned, it would be -easier-.

If they do it this way, and then later decide not to have it installed, they'll have to push all the DLLs to the target computer (which

Being the second (or third, or fourth...) company to roll out something doesn't have to be a bad thing. Yes, innovation is wonderful, but there is also a lot to say for "standing on the shoulders of giants" (with my apologies [wikipedia.org] to Bernard of Chartres and Sir Isaac Newton). If Microsoft does things well, that improvement alone might be just as valuable to the future of the e-Office as Google's first step.

Whether or not Microsoft does things well, however, will have to be seen.

I agree, me-too's aren't always bad. They foster competition and innovation. But everything shouldn't be a me too.
When a new technology shows up and M$ wants in, they quickly buy a startup that has already developed something similar, and rebrands it to M$.
That's not even a me-too, that's just laziness. Who did they buyout for this online office thing?
And putting Outlook online...that's called webmail. (I'll give them credit though...the calendar reminders look just like the desktop Outlook...that's c

Yes, almost 10 years on the heels of the "smashing success" that is OWA, they're going to move the rest of the office suite to a non-functional, browser incompatible format that costs way more that competing, functional products.

It's a sad state when other companies have remade MS Office better than Microsoft makes their own software. I like Google Documents and Sheets, but my favorite so far is ThinkFree.com. It's got the look and feel of Office, but all the collaborative features that the desktop software lacks, and it's completely accessable from anywhere in the world from just about any machine. And like Google it's completely free for the online version. The only downside is how long it takes to open a document, but it's a

In other news, Microsoft engineers finally determined JavaScript was sufficiently weak-typed enough to develop production applications in. When asked, lead Application Architect, Jing-Jong Wong Alturi stated "Our skills with the Visual Basic enterprise language will translate nicely to our new web platform. We were able to write Excel macros to take our VB code from our code respoitories, filter it through the advanced mathematic functions of Excel and translate it to JS semantics. Additionally, the memo

For the most part, the web browser is too generic to allow any product built on it to compete with an existing standalone counterpart (unless it natively make heavy use of the web), just like Google apps vs Microsoft Office standalone. Hell, even Open Office is having a hard time fighting MS with a standalone product of its own. I can imagine Open Office developers would laugh if approached with the great idea of "going online" to continue competing. You'll always have a select few who are happy with the web version but the stats are extremely small.

The only reason for Microsoft to go online is to provide an answer to Google apps and others like it. Sure it's a useless answer but at least it's an answer. MS office needs better web integration regardless.

I know this isn't some sort of a revolutionary transformation of Office. It's just making webspace available for storing docs, in case you work on the same docs from more than one location. That much is a good idea. The reason why my gradebooks are in the Google spreadsheet is because I sometimes ammend them from any one of four locations.

But the piracy-fightning motivations of this should not be ignored: For the first time, Microsoft can say that a legit version of Office can actually do something useful

The idea here seems to be to force universities and public institutions to use Microsoft as otherwise people will not be able to access their documents from Microsoft's servers. If this is not a good reason to move away from Microsoft's document formats I don't know what is. Sure, today you can just use your stand-alone version of Office, but will Office 2010 make a subscription mandatory? Will Office 2013 still allow you to store your documents locally ? Really, if you thought Google doing "software as a s

I agree that it's definitely pointless to have an "Online Office" that requires MS Office to be installed locally. However, the model opens up some interesting possibilities.Yes, there are document management solutions already in existence and all that. But here's what would be a really cool thing:

Set up office on the user's machine. The machine may be inside the office network or possibly outside of the office network. Next, there could be some sort of "MS Office Server" running that connects with the

Microsoft is clearly hoping the whole web app idea will fail. To a large extent, Office IS Microsoft. It is their huge cash cow and must be protected at all costs.

But, they don't want to be caught totally unprepared for a paradigm shift, so placing web apps allows them to gauge the market penetration and use of these types of applications, as well as keeping users locked into the MS camp.

But they don't really want to see this succeed, not even a little bit. MS doesn't "get" the web, never has, and if they have to compete on Google's home turf, they will lose.

There is one significant difference, however: unlike Google apps, Microsoft said users of its new service can only create or edit online documents if they have Office software already installed on their machines.

I'm pretty sure I just read only create or edit online documents. Going with the article, I'd say your wrong.

The "Office Live" site may state that, but I was referencing the article. If the article is flawed, fine, but according to the article, I stand by what I wrote. The article implies that you can edit documents online.
I realize the article can be, and is probably wrong, but I was referencing the article when writing my response.

Their press release talks about the 'rich, seamless experiences' that are 'personalized, integrated and available online anywhere'. Under the 'Office Live Workspace: New Web Functionality for Microsoft Office' they say 'Extend Microsoft Office. Users can easily connect to Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook on their PC via the Web.' It seems that it is their plan to rival google apps, they are just clueless.